Why You Need to Change Your Public Speaking Style

Stage acting in the Victorian period would seem bizarrely and hilariously stylized to us today. The technique was based on a gestural vocabulary that included drawing back, with both hands open and raised up, eyes wide open, and mouth agape, to indicate surprise, and that sort of thing. Actors would adopt stances that were familiar to their audiences to show the various emotions they wished to convey.

Some of the gestures survived today in the language of mime, but otherwise they’ve been forgotten, except perhaps as jokey, exaggerated reactions in slapstick routines, or in charades.

What’s happened is that succeeding generations of actors strove to make acting more and more natural – that is, more closely mimicking real human behavior. The evolution of first stage, and then movie acting, has proceeded to such a point that even a great actor of a couple of generations ago, like Sir Laurence Olivier, appears to us stiff and overly mannered now. Try watching his version of Hamlet and you’ll see what I mean.

Public speaking has undergone the same evolution at the top echelons, but the word hasn’t trickled down to many public speakers yet, even professional ones. The result is that speaking habits that were acceptable in the last quarter of the 20th Century now seem overly formal and stagey to us today.

What audiences crave is a conversation – and a conversational style – from their speakers. Television is partly to blame, but mostly it’s the parallel evolution of speaker formality to a more natural style.

Speakers today need to forget the rules they learned in public speaking classes of the last century, or in debate classes, and focus instead on having a conversation with their audiences. Keep it natural, as natural as you can be, while still delivering a speech that’s better organized than an actual conversation. Natural is still a style, but it’s an evolving one, and speakers have to keep up with the times just like actors.